All Forum Posts by: Jim K.

@David Olson

David, below please find a story from the local paper about this topic.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette new story on declining population

You have to keep in mind that Pittsburgh is the oldest major metropolitan center in the USA. Florida as a state may have the edge over everyone else, but Pittsburgh beats out any major city in it or anywhere else in the country.

What's going on to cause the numbers is very straightforward: the influx of tech professionals does not make up for the massive losses of old people. You see these low vacancy numbers because typically, old people who die here either die in their own homes or in care facilities. Focusing on the ones who die in place, most of them don't typically live in common rental property locations and so their homes are not easily converted to desirable rentals.

So the rental markets are, despite the population decline numbers, mostly doing quite well. In the last few years, there have been quite a few out-of-state people pouring money into A-class rental construction because they're doing the kind of numerical analysis from afar that you're working on. Most of those A-class rental properties are most definitely NOT doing well.

My advice to you is to partner with someone who knows this place VERY well and to make sure you offer them terms that tie your destinies together completely.

That's the way. You treat these people right and show them you're in the community to do right by the community, they'll bend over backwards to help. Sadly, for the last few decades all the real estate investment people they've seen have largely been in it to rip off the boroughs and load no-income people into slumlord-run housing in these already-devastated communities.

@Jay Cooper

See if you can get the engineer's name that the fire marshal wants to refer you to and go talk to the engineer with many pictures of the existing fire escapes on your phone. Odds are the engineer will give you basic requirements right on the spot. The fire marshal IS the building code official in East Pittsburgh. The whole borough is less than 1/2 square mile and has less than 2000 people in it. As soon as you have your design info, go back to the fire marshal with your building plan before you start working on it and make sure you get at least his verbal approval.

You buy investment property in a community like East Pittsburgh, you should be looking to build a meaningful personal relationship with the fire marshal and all the borough officials you can find to shake hands with, and it's going to take time. Old Mon Valley born and bred doesn't trust anyone who isn't Mon Valley born and bred. If you have any steelworker or cokeburner deep local roots in your family, mention them. Mention them frequently.

@Jay Cooper

Psst! Keep it down about Munhall! Some of us are trying to make some money!

Kilz Complete in a walk-in closet is more dangerous than I expected. I was wearing a half-respirator (3M-7000 series) with NIOSH-approved organic vapor cartridges, as detailed in the MSDS of the product, but I could not achieve cross-ventilation, even with the door to the closet removed. The eye irritation I experienced from the fumes also made me dizzy. I've never had that happen before. I had to break four times while priming the pantry closet with oil-based primer.

At the risk of being accused of doing a volte-face about the prospects of the area, there's an article in the Post-Gazette today about Amazon visiting several specific places in the area: the Strip District, the Hazelwood Green site, the lower Hill District, the Carrie in Rankin, and the airport site.

It made me think for a minute. The Carrie site is a really interesting space for a large variety of possible tech occupants, especially if the revitalized Pinkerton's Landing Bridge (not sure of the status of this, I know the county was doing a study last year) gives it immediate road access to the Waterfront and all the A-class luxury housing built into the development. In addition to the kind of road access that could be built in from I-376 coming out of the tunnel as well as S. Braddock Ave, there's also bus access from the MLK Busway. The site itself is huge, even considering the considerable space the Carrie takes up on it. It would be an exceptional testing areas for robotics and drones. Of course it has, well, the Carrie, a historic, omnipresent symbol of American technological excellence. Here's the last thing I saw in my research: Allegheny County owns the site, straight-up. Rich Fitzgerald will offer a lease personally at whatever favorable terms he wants, and no third parties will have a real say.

If it's not going to be Amazon, that site is most definitely going to be someone else. We'd probably all be better off if it was some Carnegie Mellon University robotics or drone tech company that needs the space for on-site testing. I really hadn't looked at the Carrie site carefully until today.

@Jared Smith

Not everyone in your position would be writing messages in this thread. I applaud you, sir. I too have seen recently disabled people give up.

On the real estate front, I would ask you to consider the reality that the market for ADA housing is becoming bigger and bigger all the time. Specifically, the aging demographics of the country dictate that short-term retirement ADA-compliant housing is going to be a growth industry for at least the next thirty years. I don't know where you're at but if I were you, I would start trying to find the oldest areas of the country to live, network, and operate in. I'm speaking from experience: while Florida is the oldest state in the USA, Greater Pittsburgh, where I am, is the oldest metropolitan area. My wife and I have a business plan completely reliant on the aging population here.

I would look into unassisted living developments, retirement condo villages, and the areas nearby for my bread and butter. We're in an aging situation now when many retirees in their middle sixties are still caring for their ninety-year-old parents. These people typically look for retirement housing that allows them to visit mom and dad in nearby care facilities, and they're also worried about aging in place themselves because they have firsthand experience with the problems of noncompliant housing.

As far as I can tell, astonishingly, no one else is doing this in rentals in Pittsburgh, despite the obvious demographics. This is just an example of one of the immense yet ignored opportunities throughout the field of caring for the elderly.

@Susan Clark

The consensus is RTA, and you've received some very good advice about opting for plywood if possible, tiling under the cabinets if possible, staying away from particle board/MTF, and going with Home Depot over Lowes for an edge in quality.

When you assemble them, go slowly and carefully on the first upper and lower cabinets. The rest go quickly and surely if you really nail the first ones.

@Terrell Washington

Buy your houses from dead people. Our last two properties have been estate sales, bought from a traditional agent thoroughly embedded in our target area. I've talked about this strategy before on BP, but I haven't written a blog post about it yet.

You've got to find an agent who handles a lot of as-is estate sales for a lot of people in your target area. Typically, this agent has been around forever, served on the municipal board, coached kid's softball for twenty years, volunteered for all sorts of social functions, knows EVERYONE in your target municipality. These are the local agents who have put in years of meeting people and passing the card. These are the first people called after the funeral.

So the way we found this agent was pretty specific to Allegheny County in southwestern PA, greater Pittsburgh, where we operate. I'm a contractor and I know that master plumbers throughout the county have to be registered with the county's Health Department, and ACHD keeps the list of plumbers online. I found four master plumbers in our target municipality and called them up to ask them if they could give me the number of an agent who's worked with them to do work on estate properties in the past. Two of them came up with the same agent, and that's how I met a guy I'll call "Boyd."

Boyd sold us two places he had as pocket listings. We came in hard and fast, lowball all-cash offers with no contingencies, 5% earnest money, close just as soon as the title clears. That's how grandkids living far away want to sell Grandma's house and turn their headache into easy money. They'll sell to the first guy they know who comes to them with a signed contract, a fat earnest-money check, and a promise that the buyers will not back out of the sale.

You can expect to haul a lot of dead people's trash out of the places and find all kinds of undisclosed problems with this strategy, but it's been incredibly worthwhile for us so far.

@Bob H.

@Mike Reynolds

Thank you both. I'm worried about sanding it because of the lead issue. Mike, I agree. Kalsomine would be chalkier and scratch. I'll try the alcohol test today.

Oil-based primer should up the adhesion, with 24-hour cure time before I apply paint. It just means a few hours in a mask and closing down the site during dry time. This place is going to be a long-term rental property. I want to lock the paint job down now and and do easy touch-ups on it for the next twenty years between tenants.